KeepVolunteering.org connects hands with needs

Alice Brown feeds her son, Liam, in between working on updates for KeepVolunteering.org, the website she started to help volunteers continue to connect with needs in the area after the April 27 tornadoes. She has expanded the website this week to include a section for the Joplin, Mo., area. Older son, Calvin, at left, works on completing his online homeschool lessons. (The Huntsville Times/Kay Campbell)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- Alice Brown was frustrated.

Fleeing the power outage after the April 27 tornadoes, she saw television reports of the devastation in Madison County. When she and her family returned to their home in Huntsville, which was undamaged except for a tree down in the front yard and a flood of water in the porch she has converted into a home office, she wanted to help.

She and her mother headed to the Red Cross registration site - and were told there was nothing they could do. The next day, they arrived at the Monrovia Community Center, only to be told there was only two hours of work for them.

And Brown knew the need was much greater.

She also knew that, though Red Cross requirements limit volunteers to older teenagers and adults, her 11-year-old son would be able to help drag limbs and do other basic clean-up. She began finding her own networks to join and friends to help.

Then, a couple weeks after the tornado, when she drove past the Monrovia Community Center and realized that volunteer center had been closed, she knew she had to do something.

The volunteers were there. The need was there. How could they intersect?

"You couldn't see all that devastation and not help," Brown said this week in between spooning cereal into the grinning mouth of her 15-month-old son, Liam, who was sitting in a high chair beside her desk. "I realized the current system just wasn't working well. There was no where for the average Joe to go to find out where to get plugged in."

Brown, whose home-based business, The Open Door Design, creates websites and other marketing materials for companies, knew the obvious answer: Set up a website where people could meet.

That's easier said than done - in the flurry of getting www.KeepVoluntering.org set up, she worked with few breaks for a 24-hour stretch. Her server, Keith Ford's Webfire, donated the housing for the site. Another work-at-home mom who is a friend of Brown's, Alli Batey, agreed to help with the Twitter and Facebook feeds.

But it worked.

Within 24 hours, the site had more than 1,000 hits. People began posting needs. Volunteers began connecting. The Forum page on the site began to have conversations back and forth as people figured out the best way to get started.

"There's a ton of work to be done by non-specialists," said the Rev. Kerry Holder Joffrion of Huntsville's Interfaith Mission Service, who is using the site to get the word out about the FEMA Form Brigade's search for volunteers to help people fill out the emergency fund requests. "This is a grass-roots site set up by someone who saw a need and stepped in to fill it."

KeepVolunteering.org was set up in time to also begin connecting first-responders to the Joplin, Mo., tornado this week. Brown spent nearly all night Monday adding the pages so that Missouri work could be sorted out from the Alabama projects. She's hoping to find a lawyer to help her trademark the site's name to help protect the ability of people to find the site without confusion.

"It's been a whirlwind," Brown said. "It's been insane."

Her response to the need comes from her deeply felt sense of responsibility to her neighbors, she said. While she considers her faith in God to be a bedrock in her life, she is not formally associated with any local congregation. But responding to a neighbor doesn't take a formal connection to religion, she said.

"If people, say, just go to the website and pick out a food bank to take food to, and if they just drive out there to deliver it," Brown said. "They'll take a look around, absorb what they are driving through and think about what these people are going through? At that point, if they have got a heart, they'll think, 'I have got to find a way to help.'"